Automotive networks are a recently deployed type of network designated by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) by the standard 802.11p. Certain fundamental aspects of the WAVE standard are: the use of a dedicated radio frequency (RF) spectrum in the 5.8 Ghz range, the use of freely associating stations which do not rely on an association protocol, and a first set of generally fixed-location wireless devices known as roadside equipment (RSE), and a second set of generally mobile vehicular-sited wireless devices known and on-board equipment (OBE). The RSE and OBE may communicate with each other in particular fixed time intervals of time, which may be dedicated use, multiplexed by frequency, or multiplexed in time to provide shared access. A time multiplexing aspect provides a series of fixed communication intervals for each type of station.
Because of the distributed and non-centralized nature of this type of network, the RSE and OBE equipment utilize a series of repeating time windows which provide for devices to access the network, where the window timings are governed by a uniform time corrected (UTC) clock, and where each station synchronizes to a time server or uses a GPS signal source to determine UTC time, which establishes the transmit windows under 802.11p.
A problem arises where it is desired to add additional communication services alongside 802.11p which are integrated into the 802.11p connectivity and accessory services, such as Bluetooth (described in www.bluetooth.org standards), WLAN (Wireless Local Area Network, described by the IEEE 802.11 series of standards), or ZigBee (described in www.zigbee.org standards). Although each of these RF communications protocols operate in respective RF frequency channels which are distinct from 802.11p, a separate set of baseband processors for each separate protocol is needed, as the 802.11p protocol does not provide for integration with these other wireless network types, where each wireless network protocol has its own frequency of operation, modulation type, association sequence, and ISO layer 2 and layer 3 protocols. This hardware burden has the effect of requiring that each wireless protocol have a separate RF transceiver, layer 1 PHY and layer 2 MAC, thereby greatly increasing the current consumption of the transceiver for support of just two protocols.
It is desired to provide a baseband processor and method of operation which provides combined 802.11p transceiver operation with at least one other protocol, such as Bluetooth, any of the WLAN protocols (IEEE 802.11a, b, g, n, or ac), or ZigBee (IEEE 802.15.4).